Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan admit that Unix was a prank (1989) | Hacker News Reader

Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan admit that Unix was a prank (1989)

stokely.com

57 pointsimran374015 comments

I'll always remember a backhanded remark Mary Shaw (https://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/shaw-mary.html) made about AT&T Bell Labs at a talk she gave about Computer Architecture as the "New Jersey School of Computation."

This looks like a good place to link the Unix Hater’s Handbook[1]

360 pages?!

It's Volume 1.

The copyright on the page says 2013, but I think this was actually written in 1989 ("20 years ago", "1969")

also really classy to put their own copyright notice on a document "found on usenet and the author could not be determined"

probably just a standard footer that wraps everything

Yeah, probably, but that still doesn't make it right.

Edit: hmm. They say over 20 years. That probably means later than 1989 but not 1999.

1991

Not sure if it was joking about being from computerworld?

It's not in this edition -

Conspiracy -- Linus started Linux as an April fools joke from this April fools joke.

"This has been brewing since april 1991"

"At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years."

Hilarious. Ended up selling it to everybody.

But seriously, given the long history of failures (i.e. search CVE database for buffer overflow), this joke does read like a true story.

> This piece was found on Usenet. This is fiction, not reality. Always remember that this is not true. It's really a joke, right? -- Editor

Nah, I refuse to believe it. Death to the author. Poe's Law and all that.

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that is a coincidence."

Nice. Does this mean to be a successful Unix Admin you also need to be an accomplished psychonaut?

>Dennis Ritchie said: "What really tore it (just when ADA was catching on), was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke

Lol.